BLOGS

All Posts (6498)

Sort by

Immersion Lithography...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 9, 2015 at 11:02pm
Figure 1. (a) A sketched diagram of 193i exposure head. Water fills the gap between the final lens and the wafer. The water injection and confinement system is not included in the diagram. (b) Optical paths of two-beam interference for both "dry" and 193i exposures.


Topics: Economy, Education, Photolithography, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology, STEM


This is a good article in Solid State Technology and I leave a follow-on link to SPIE (the International Society for Optics and Photonics). Regular photolithography is focusing ultraviolet light through a chrome mask (through a medium of air), which contains the pattern for the integrated circuits that make up a lot of our electronics, the Internet and in the case of our economy and travel yesterday: Wall Street and United Airlines. Immersion Lithography usually involves water as the illustration from the SPIE figure above shows.

I believe a great deal in the educational infrastructure that must exist for not just (as I've often referred to) future replacement workers, but from the perspective of viable jobs for young people to matriculate into, the "mystery" of high tech needs to be removed. It's more like hard work, the same effort in say, mastering a sports skill, a similar discipline can be mustered for STEM fields. It keeps crime down and hopes up. As a nation, we need to stop obfuscating about contrived controversies in science; fighting the Civil War (what about war is "civil" anyway?); the racism, sexism, homophobia and get everyone in the boat to ROW - hard. Patching ignored holes only delays our sinking... or salvation.

While the lithography equipment market sometimes seems like A Tale of Two Cities, it’s more complicated than that. The basic fact is that the semiconductor industry is soldiering on with 193-nanometer immersion lithography technology and multiple-patterning exposures while extreme-ultraviolet lithography continues its long-aborning development.

ASML Holding is the leading vendor in the EUV lithography field, and it’s also a big supplier of 193nm immersion lithography systems. The industry consensus now seems to be that the near future will see the combined use of EUV and immersion, possibly at the 10-nanometer process node and definitely at the 7nm node. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess.

ASML had big news to reveal at the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium in February. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing had successfully exposed 1,022 wafers within 24 hours on ASML’s NXE:3300B EUV system, with sustained power of more than 90 watts from the scanner’s power source.

In April, ASML reported that “one of its major U.S. customers” had agreed to order at least 15 EUV systems. Industry speculation on the unidentified customer quickly centered on Intel. The Dutch company has been relatively quiet since then.

Solid State Electronics:
Immersion lithography remains the industry’s workhorse technology, Jeff Dorsch
SPIE: 193nm immersion lithography: Status and challenges, Yayi Wei and David Back

Read more…

Quantum Dot Spectrometer...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 8, 2015 at 9:16pm
This artist's impression shows five different types of colloidal quantum dots being deposited onto the detector array of a digital camera. (Courtesy: Mary O'Reilly)


Topics: Applied Physics, Modern Physics, Nanotechnology, Quantum Mechanics, Spectrograph


The first-ever spectrometer made from quantum dots has been unveiled by Jie Bao of Tsinghua University in China and Moungi Bawendi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. According to its inventors, the instrument could be produced commercially to be as small, inexpensive and simple as a mobile-phone camera. Such compact spectrometers could find a wide range of applications, from gathering scientific data on space missions to sensors integrated within household appliances.

Spectrometry measures the intensity of light as a function of wavelength and is used to study various properties of light-emitting and light-absorbing substances. This makes it an invaluable analytical technique that is used in a broad range of scientific and technological disciplines. Most spectroscopic techniques involve dispersing light in terms of its wavelength. A prism, for example, can be used to bend light into its constituent wavelengths (colours) and a spectrum can then be acquired using a position-sensitive light detector. Bao and Bawendi have taken a different approach, using quantum dots to create an array of band-pass filters for the light to pass through before it reaches a position-sensitive detector.

Quantum dots are tiny pieces of semiconductor just a few nanometres across. They are sometimes described as artificial atoms because, like atoms, they absorb and emit light at specific wavelengths. Unlike atoms, however, the wavelengths can be tuned by simply adjusting the size of the quantum dot.

Bao hit upon the idea of using quantum-dot materials in spectrometers while investigating their use in solar cells and light detectors. "I realized this material has a very unique property that no other material can match," he says, referring to the simple means of tuning the optical response. With this in mind, he began investigating using large numbers of quantum dots in a new type of spectrometer. By monitoring the light that the dots absorbed, it would be possible to determine relative intensities at various wavelengths in the spectrum of the incident light.

Physics World:
Spectrometer made from quantum dots is compact and low cost, Anna Demming, Nanotechweb.org

Read more…

Does Amazon Love Authors?

Posted by LN Gibson on July 8, 2015 at 5:10pm

Revised payment methods for Kindle  Owners Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited, like other Amazon services, are author and reader friendly, argues Orna Ross

Zemanta Related Posts Thumbnail“Now will you admit that Amazon is no friend to authors?” said my book-loving friend, who had telephoned me from Ireland for a chat. He’d heard a writer on Irish radio talking about what he called  “Amazon attack on author incomes”.

“You know, whenever I see what the media writes and says about Amazon,” I said, “I wonder if the information I’m getting about other topics is as skewed and inaccurate.”

“But this poor writer’s income had been totally decimated, overnight. On a whim. They are only paying writers for the number of pages read now, instead of the whole book. Aren’t you worried?”

Sigh.

I do understand that most people outside our business (and some within) are not au fait with the difference between a reader buying an ebook on Amazon vis a vis borrowing it via Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL), or downloading it as part of their Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscription. [Details on these differences, from a writer’s perspective, here, if you’d like to know more]

But this wasn’t an honest misunderstanding. This was, once again, a wide strand of the press and reading public refusing to let facts inform the latest chapter in their “Amazon Is A Scary Monster” story.

My friend is a reader who resents ebooks and his determination to diss Amazon over this latest move was echoed in media, old and new, across  the world — UK daily newspapers right-wing ( The Telegraph) and left The Guardian, culture press USA (The Atlantic), business press (Canada Business), tech reporting (Gismodo Australia), not to mention among authors online. In all of these articles, and hundreds more, errors, fallacies, and  miscalculations flew, laced with howls of protest from self-interested authors.

They confused sales with borrows, did calculations that overlooked how KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Page) counts are higher than print page counts, overlooked the leap in the global fund from $3 million to $11 million; and generally assumed bad motives and outcomes.

It was left to author blogs (see Hugh Howey and Catherine Ryan Howard ) and the ever-thoughtful publishing commentator, Porter Anderson, to keep the record accurate.

So Why All The Negativity?
You could put it down to the negativity bias to which, psychologists tell us, we are all prone — do you pay more attention to a good review or bad? — but it’s more than that. What we have here is fear.

Amazon is powerful and has flexed that power in negotiations with publishers. It is at the forefront of technological change that has thrown up big challenges for independent publishers and wholesalers, booksellers and authors. And it keeps on ringing the commercial changes in an industry that is conservative and that, quite rightly, values its cultural role as well as its commercial well-being.

Continued...

Read more…

Daniel José Older creates female black heroes to make fantasy more real

Posted by LN Gibson on July 7, 2015 at 6:36pm

It’s fair to say that Daniel José Older is having a very good year.

In the first week of 2015, Penguin published his first novel, Half-Resurrection Blues. By the end of January, Anika Noni Rose’s production company had optioned the film and television rights to the book, as well as rights for the following two in the series. This week sees him publish a hotly anticipated young adult novel called Shadowshaper.

To top it off, he got married in March.

Until 2014, Older worked by day as an emergency medical technician in Manhattan. He wrote mostly at night. And he sees himself, explicitly, as an outsider to the literary and publishing scene: “I entered the writing work clearly and strategically to do this thing, to write these books, to get them into the world and fuck with people, and to generally fuck shit up,” he says at a restaurant in Brooklyn.

Shadowshaper is set in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where Older lives. The protagonist, a young Afro-Latina named Sierra, learns about her family’s history of supernatural powers. She can, as it turns out, interact with the spirit world. Her family has gone to great lengths to conceal that fact from her, but now it’s Sierra’s responsibility to protect them from what’s coming.

Older’s imagined Brooklyn is full of danger, less gentrified than the real-life version, and decidedly diverse. “We’re doing something very political by deciding whose life matters, where we’re going to focus things, and who we erase from the picture,” he says. This kind of diversity, he feels, is lacking in most other fantasy YA novels. “When we create worlds based on this world that don’t include diversity, we’re lying,” he says. “We’re not being honest as authors. Even if it’s infused with magical powers, or zombies, or whatever you’ll have, we should still be trying to tell the truth. Then, it becomes a question of what truth, how are we telling it, and whose truth do we take the time to repeat?”

Older is critical of books that he says fail to include racial diversity – such as, he says, The Hunger Games. He chalks it up to a “phenomenal lack of imagination” on the part of the author, and a laziness, he feels, that is designed to keep some people out of the picture. “To be able to figure out all these quirky things about what you imagine the future will be like, and not somehow have any folks of colour doing anything heroic or worthwhile in it, what happened?” he asked. “Where did we go?”

Continued...

Read more…

My MS is almost ready for submission

Posted by Sylvia Petro on July 7, 2015 at 1:30pm

I recently uploaded the first 25 pages of my MS on my website: www.snpetro.com/. Below is a description of my novel and a link to the first 25 pages.

The Warrior from Monde:

Human women are ideal for seeding Castra’s alien army. But the children of such a union are not conceived without a price. One part his mother, and nine parts his father, Lucian is like no other child. With his father absent, his mother faces raising him in squalor, and in a country unfamiliar to her, Monde.

Lucian grows up in a world of politics, religious contention, and spies. But what he craves is war. And he has been gifted with the body, mind, and courage of a warrior. His formidable strength and superior intelligence incite both awe and envy. He earns praise from as high as the king. But not all see Lucian’s abilities as benign. Suspicion soon forms around him. His inborn charm keeps most enemies at bay. But not for long. He struggles to suppress growing, dark urges. And he sees the world as rank with weak men and vain challenges. This leaves him to question why he was born with such gifts. Are they to be wasted on a world he feels distant from?

This book is currently undergoing editing. I hope to have it ready for agent submission by the fall.

Read the first 25 pages (author’s edit): The Warrior from Monde, first 25 pages

Please read the sample, and leave a comment on my site here: https://snpetro.com/

Read more…

Physics of Gas Mileage...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 7, 2015 at 7:28am
Credit: John Moreno/Argonne National Laboratory


Topics: Applied Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Physics and Pop Culture, Semiconductor Technology, Thermodynamics


If you bought a car in the late 2000's - post 2010 - you likely have a feature in your vehicle that calculates your gas mileage and range you have on the amount of fuel. This can be a little confusing for sure, but surprisingly (or if you follow this blog, not so much) a lot of physics goes into the LED display on your dashboard. This article from Phys.org gives a good overview of the five properties that goes into that calculation your integrated circuits do for you. After all, it's summer in the northern hemisphere, and wherever you are on that part of the globe, we're all driving SOMEWHERE.

Physics is inescapable. It's everywhere, making your Frisbees fly, your toilets flush and your pasta water boil at a lower temperature at altitude. We've harnessed these forces, along with chemistry and engineering, to build a marvelous contraption called a car—but many of the same properties that allow you to fly along the freeway also affect how much gas mileage you get out of your car. We talked to Argonne transportation engineer Steve Ciatti to explore some of the forces at work in your engine when it's on the road.

1. Vapor pressure
2. Friction
3. Drag coefficient
4. Momentum
5. Rolling resistance

Bonus: Air temperature

Phys.org: Five properties of physics that affect your gas mileage, Louise Lerner

Read more…

X-ray Free Electron Laser...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 6, 2015 at 9:37am
Image Source: Spring 8


Topics: Optical Physics, Laser, Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics, X-rays


New experimental tools and techniques open windows that allow scientists to peek into unexplored scientific realms and to test theoretical predictions. X-ray imaging is unique, both because of the penetrating power of x rays in solid matter—as Wilhelm Röntgen discovered in 1895—and because x-ray wavelengths are short enough to resolve the interatomic spacing in matter via diffraction—Max von Laue’s discovery in 1912. Those properties allow scientists to push forward fundamental physical sciences and to find major applications in structural imaging, from new commercial drugs to jet turbine blades.

The early success of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) has bolstered plans for more accelerator-based x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) in Europe and Asia. But the new machines create a challenge: The ultrabright femtosecond pulses generated by XFELs have properties far beyond previous sources. They carry a million times more pulse energy than synchrotron x rays, are 10 000 times shorter, and have coherence that can produce focused x-ray beams with intensities up to 1020 W/cm2, more than a billion times greater than any previously achieved. The XFELs demand new research methods that can take advantage of those characteristics.

Physics Today:
Brighter and faster: The promise and challenge of the x-ray free-electron laser
Philip H. Bucksbaum and Nora Berrah

Read more…

The Meaning...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 5, 2015 at 9:30am
Image Source: Wikiquote
"Once you have learned to read you will forever be free."
"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave."
More at Brainyquote.com


Topics: #BlackLivesMatter, Civil Rights, Frederick Douglass, History, Human Rights


Frederick Douglass was known well for being an escaped slave, committed republican (at that time in our history, the progressive party) and abolitionist. He was a staunch advocate of equality and education, seeing his own personal emancipation centered on something slaves were banned from doing: reading. His former master chastised his wife, saying teaching Frederick how to read would "ruin him" and make him unfit for the peculiar institution. He couldn't have agreed more.

In his uniquely bellicose manner, Mr. Douglass tackles this in a long soliloquy given July 5, 1852 in Rochester, NY. I have thought of Charleston, South Carolina and how the narrative of our nation had been determined by a defeated foe to the point of redefining the narrative and main rationale (if you can call it that) behind the Civil War: the continued indentured servitude of a kidnapped people in perpetuity. In light of the debate sparked by the assassination of nine innocents in Mother Emanuel AME, and the symbol the terrorist so revered; the possibility on that symbol's removal in the bloody aftermath, I give you Frederick Douglass' apropos speech on its 163rd anniversary in scroll excerpt (not visible in some platforms) and read by the accomplished actor and voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones.

He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept over me quite unfavorable to the exercise of my limited powers of speech. The task before me is one which requires much previous thought and study for its proper performance. I know that apologies of this sort are generally considered flat and unmeaning. I trust, however, that mine will not be so considered. Should I seem at ease, my appearance would much misrepresent me. The little experience I have had in addressing public meetings, in country school houses, avails me nothing on the present occasion.

The papers and placards say that I am to deliver a Fourth of July Oration. This certainly sounds large, and out of the common way, for me. It is true that I have often had the privilege to speak in this beautiful Hall, and to address many who now honor me with their presence. But neither their familiar faces, nor the perfect gage I think I have of Corinthian Hall seems to free me from embarrassment.

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable-and the difficulties to he overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence I will proceed to lay them before you.

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the Fourth of July. It is the birth day of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, as what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. l am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot's heart might be sadder, and the reformer's brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young.-Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.


History is a Weapon: The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro, Frederick Douglass
Related link: What the Civil War Can Teach us About Patriotism, Jarret Ruminski, PhD Historian, "That Devil History" blog

Read more…

Web Series Premiere - 8zombies - 01 - No Running in the Halls - Nolos Quinn

Posted by Nolos Quinn on July 3, 2015 at 7:30pm

http://dai.ly/x2wh7aj

http://dai.ly/x2wh7aj

Welcome to the Premiere Webisode of the series, 8zombies! A 3D action, animated series about survival in a post zombie apocalyptic world.

Written, produced, directed and animated by Nolos Quinn.

Visit our Facebook page and website, www.8zombies.com for news, updates, etc.....

Comment - Like - Share

Thanks for viewing!!

Read more…

well..lets see

Posted by Leah Ashton on July 3, 2015 at 9:46am

I am currently working on my first werewolf story. Im not sure about it though. I have written about witches, amazons, faeries, mermaids and even a ghost, but never a werewolf. I was watching the TV show, Bitten. It is about the only woman to survive being turned into a werewolf.

On this show one of her pack mates is African American. It was hard to find information on werewolves let alone African American ones.

I put my story up on a site called Watt pad. if you are interested in reading it, inbox me and i will send a link to you.

I could use some feed back on it. In other news, i finally decided to go to school for writing. I know i dont need a degree in writing, but i want to do it for me. A bachelor's degree in Creative Writing for entertainment, would be something great for me to have. I will be the first one in my family to have a degree in something.

I am also gathering information on another character i am making. I am sure im going to have to change her name. I had named her Gensys, because she was the beginning of a new type of human. She is an elemental and this is her natural progression.  I wanted her to be a superhero, but i am having a time trying to create powers for her. I dont want to copy off of another superhero by accident.

Since i was accepted here I have seen the magazine with the name i had picked on it, so maybe that is a sign that im right where im supposed to be. I am still going to look for another name and keep gathering information.

Read more…

Pluto's Doorstep...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 3, 2015 at 7:22am
New color images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced.
NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI


Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Planetary Science, Pluto, Space Exploration


Some articles still remove Pluto from the planet family; others refer to it as a "planetoid" (small). We're 11 days from the closest flyby of the dwarf in our neighborhood right before the Oort Cloud and interstellar space. July 14th should be an exciting day in science.

New color images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft show two very different faces of the mysterious dwarf planet, one with a series of intriguing spots along the equator that are evenly spaced. Each of the spots is about 300 miles (480 kilometers) in diameter, with a surface area that’s roughly the size of the state of Missouri.

Scientists have yet to see anything quite like the dark spots; their presence has piqued the interest of the New Horizons science team due to the remarkable consistency in their spacing and size. While the origin of the spots is a mystery for now, the answer may be revealed as the spacecraft continues its approach to the mysterious dwarf planet. “It’s a real puzzle — we don’t know what the spots are, and we can’t wait to find out,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder. “Also puzzling is the longstanding and dramatic difference in the colors and appearance of Pluto compared to its darker and grayer moon Charon.” [1]

On July 14, New Horizons will zoom within just 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto, snapping history's first up-close photos of the dwarf planet's mysterious surface.

On July 1, NASA released images showing Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, in true color. The photos reveal a series of evenly spaced dark splotches, each of them about 300 miles (480 kilometers) wide, near Pluto's equator on one side of the dwarf planet.

New Horizons scientists don't know what to make of the features yet. [2]

1. Astronomy: Spots on Pluto fascinate as New Horizons gets the all clear, NASA, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, Laurel, Maryland
2. Space.com: On Pluto's Doorstep: Latest Photos by Approaching New Horizons Probe, Space.com staff

Read more…

Amazon set to pay self-published authors as little as $0.006 per page read

Posted by William Hayashi on July 2, 2015 at 10:00pm

Writers of shorter works could lose out on revenue as company’s Kindle Owners Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited no longer pay per copy downloaded

Self-published authors could be paid as little as $0.006 per page read under new rules planned by Amazon.

Writers who make their works available through Amazon’s Kindle Owners Lending Library, and a similar service called Kindle Unlimited, will no longer be paid per copy downloaded following a move announced last week.

Instead, they would receive a payment based on how many pages had actually been read, with longer books receiving a higher potential payment than shorter works.

In an email to authors, sent on Wednesday, Amazon revealed exactly how little that payment would be.

Click here for the full story

Read more…

Book Review: Angel Lover

Posted by Rasheedah Prioleau on July 2, 2015 at 6:33pm

Angel Lover
By: Tricia Skinner

I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Half-human angels with a mission to kill their fallen angel fathers, oh the DRAMA.

This is the second book in Skinner’s Angel Assassins Series. Even though I missed the first one, it was not hard at all getting drawn in and caught up. The hero of the story, Kasdeja (Kas for short) is the tech savvy Nephilim (half-angel) in a group of Nephilim, abandoned by their fathers as children and sentenced to die for being half human.... MORE

Read more…

Quantum Myths vs Facts...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 2, 2015 at 6:21am
Source: Claes Johnson on Mathematics and Science


Topics: Humor, Modern Physics, Physics and Pop Culture, Quantum Mechanics


Okay, the creative license of writers to invent their own "rules" in fiction gave us warp drive, automatic doors and cell phones. Two out of three's not bad.

There are times I cringe (as do a lot of physics, engineering and science types) when the writer has gone completely "off-the-range" on certain things that makes their plot work, just not the physics. The other thing that's like scratching a chalk board (an old-school metaphor in this age of dry erase boards and Power Point), is when pop psychology appropriates the language of quantum physics and totally misuses it to give credence to phenomena even THEY can't explain. Entanglement like "tesseract" gets used as a space filler - a gee whiz who-zits - when they don't have anything to say or a background to describe it. It's more likely statistical probability, blind luck or gas; Rolaids being a far better prescription.

Epoch Times is something I generally don't follow, but in this article, they do get some things right. I also list a Physics arXiv article below that goes even deeper into the subject.

Quantum physics is so fascinating that it appeals to a broader lay audience than a lot of other topics in science. It’s also so difficult to grasp and attempts to simplify it for a lay audience may open it to misunderstanding.

It is invoked to explain all sorts of strange, even paranormal, phenomena. Yet these explanations are often based on misconceptions about quantum physics. Quantum physics may indeed have the potential to explain such phenomena, since much remains to be discovered about it. But it is important to remain clear on what it does and does not actually claim at this point in its development.

1. No Indication That Entanglement Transfers Information (think "telepathy").
2. Consciousness Is Not Necessarily the Key to Collapsing the Wave-Function (Schrödinger’s cat, The Uncertainty Principle, the observer).
3. It Doesn't Only Describe the Subatomic Level (color, elasticity, black holes).
4. Speaking of a ‘Wave-Particle Duality’ Is Not Exactly Correct (see paper below).

Epoch Times: 4 Common Misconceptions About Quantum Physics, Tara MacIsaac
Physics arXiv: Quantum mechanics: Myths and facts, Hrvoje Nikolic
Theoretical Physics Division, Rudjer Boˇskovic Institute, Zagreb, Croatia

Read more…

Miles Morales to become first black Spider-Man

Posted by LN Gibson on July 1, 2015 at 11:32pm

After more than half a century of sterling service to webslinging, Peter Parker is to be replaced as Marvel's official Spider-Man by a mixed-race character who for four years has been wearing the suit in an alternate universe.

Miles Morales, a teenager from Brooklyn with an African American father and Puerto Rican mother, has played a version of Spider-Man since 2011, but will take over the mainstream role from Parker this autumn.

He appears in a series of comics set in an alternate universe where Peter Parker has died, and where he has reluctantly received a set of superpowers similar to Parker's after being bitten by a genetically altered spider.

Spider-Man is Marvel's most successful character, selling nearly $1.3 billion of merchandise last year, eclipsing their next bestseller, The Avengers, which shifted around $325 million.

Spider-Man's popularity stems in part from the that fact there could be anyone under that hood, and the character has been portrayed as different characters across the Marvel comics universe.

Morales is the first black character to wear the Spidey suit, but the second Latino after the half-Mexican geneticist, Miguel O'Hara who featured in a 1992 comic set in the year 2099.

Miles Morales was introduced in the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, which run parallel to Marvel's mainstream universe, and his arrival received mixed reactions. Some people criticised the character's existence as politically correct, but many non-white readers praised the fact that either they, or their children, now had a big-name role model in the Marvel Universe.

Continue...

Read more…

Doubled Battery Life...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on July 1, 2015 at 5:14pm


SiC-free graphene growth on Si NPs. (a) A low-magnification TEM image of Gr–Si NP. (b) A higher-magnification TEM image for the same Gr–Si NP from the white box in a. (Insets) The line profiles from the two red boxes indicate that the interlayer spacing between graphene layers is ~3.4 Å, in good agreement with that of typical graphene layers based on van der Waals interaction. (c) A high-magnification TEM image visualizing the origins (red arrows) from which individual graphene layers grow. (d) A schematic illustration showing the sliding process of the graphene coating layers that can buffer the volume expansion of Si. Credit: Nature Communications 6, Article number: 7393 doi:10.1038/ncomms8393

Topics: Batteries, Green Tech, Semiconductors, Materials Science, STEM


Currently, my laptop battery lasts about two hours straight out of the box. Over time and wear, that diminishes to having to use the power cord until a new one comes in; my Kindle and mobile phone has about six and eight hours charge respectively. I listed green tech. Longer battery life should translate to less finding their way to landfills.

(Phys.org)—A team of researches affiliated with Samsung's Advanced Institute of Technology, along with colleagues from other institutions in Korea has found a way to greatly extend lithium-ion battery life. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the team describes their new technique and the results they achieved using it.

Consumers want their phone batteries to last longer—that is no secret, and battery life has been extended, but mostly due to improved efficiency of the electronics that depend on it. Researchers at phone companies and elsewhere have been working hard to find a way to get more power out of the same size battery but have to date, not made much progress. In this new effort, the researchers looked to silicon and graphene for a better battery.

Phys.org: Samsung develops lithium-ion battery with nearly double the life, Bob Yirka

Read more…

Albinism and fiction

Posted by Virginia L Small on June 30, 2015 at 4:00pm

Okay; this is a rant, and will probably be my only, or one of very few blogs. That's because I have other venues for writing.

Anyway: Here is something that has caused me consternation for a very long time. Albinos in the media have always been seen as other than human. We have been given red demonic eyes, stark white unruly hair and skin that resembles a corpse or a powdered doughnut.

In fact, we have been portrayed as vampires, aliens, an even underground cannibal brainless brutes. Although I do know some brainless brutes with albinism, this is by no means the norm for people like me.

Believe me; if I had the power to make my eyes glow and make people step out in front of trucks, I certainly would. But I can't do that so breathe easy.

If you have ever seen Village of the Damned, The Time Machine, The Omega Man, or read a Marvel comic you know what I mean. If you've seen End of Days (I know that guy) read The Famished Road or Sent For You Yesterday, you are all too familiar with the albino as some otherworldly freak. I'm not even going to talk about Powder. ugh.

There are people who actually think we are witches or magic.Sometimes this is rather funny. I met a man who thought I was a witch and offered to save my soul. But sometimes it can be downright dangerous. People in parts of Africa have been hacking up albino children collecting their body parts for sale. They have had to put children in safe camps for their protection.

But I digress.

There was a man who contacted me about an albino character he wanted to create for a game. I suggested he give the character long blond dreads. That was a long time ago and I haven't heard anything.

So what would happen if there were a character in a comic book that was just a person with albinism? No superhuman powers, not out to conquer the universe. It would be just like putting an evil dwarf in your story who wasn't evil. 

It's all about using disability and difference, as a metaphor for "the other".

I'm not going to offer any answers here since I don't have any myself. How do you portray a person with albinism in the comics? Why would you put them in the story? How would you draw them? I'll let you figure that out. I just thought I'd give you some food for thought.

Read more…

An Interesting New Social Network Designed For Marketing & Commerce

Posted by William Hayashi on June 30, 2015 at 9:27am

A new social network that uses a points-based system to encourage people to interact with content is closing in on 1 million registered users since it launched earlier this month, according to the company's CEO.

"We've been around for a week. We are already serving significant impressions," said Bill Ottman, the founder and CEO of Minds, in an interview last week. "We're not saying we're an ad network on the scale of Facebook or Google or television: It's the potential of what it might become."

Minds has existed as a blogging platform since 2012, reaching 30,000 users in its private alpha mode. But on June 19, the developers behind it launched a new social network and associated mobile applications for Apple and Android devices. And according to Ottman, it's already wildly popular, with almost 1 million accounts.

Click here for the full story

Read more…